Screenly now powers over 10,000 screens

We’re incredibly grateful for the uptake we have received with Screenly. We’re excited to announce that Screenly now powers over 10,000 active Screens. When we wrote the very first prototype for Screenly, we had no idea how big it would become. We simply wrote it as a fun hobby project, which then evolved into a business.

What we might be seeing now is even more exciting: the beginnings of the legendary Hockey Stick Growth.

We want to thank all of you who helped us get here, and hope that you will be with us for the next chapter of the story.

Screenly V2 Beta update

In order to do our demo for Mobile World Congress (see below) we had to work hard to wrap up some missing features in the Screenly V2 beta. The team really did a fantastic job. Now, getting Screenly V2 out the door is the top priority for us. For those of you who have been selected for the invite-only beta program you have, hopefully, noticed that the product is getting closer and closer (not to mention even faster).

We are now working closely with Ubuntu to knock-out the remaining bugs before we can open up the beta to a larger audience.

Video Content

Over the years, we’ve received a number of requests for video tutorials for various things around Screenly. While there are already a lot of unofficial Screenly videos and tutorials on YouTube, we have now decided to record a number of official videos. You will find all of them in our Tutorial Playlist on YouTube.

The first tutorial that we published is titled “How do I install Screenly on my Raspberry Pi?” and you can find it below.

Events

Mobile World Congress 2017

For the second year in a row, we exhibited at Mobile World Congress (MWC) together with Ubuntu. We thought we had a good event last year, but this year topped that by a long shot.

The demo we showed this year was a simulated retail store where we showcased an integration with our new partner Evrythng. In the demo, we were able to scan a physical item using an NFC phone (or take a photo). When you scanned the item, more information was displayed on two screens (one showing inventory level and the other showing promotional material).

This demo was a teaser of a key element in the future of Screenly, where we see Screenly being part of a bigger equation using various API integrations. In this particular demo a physical item was being scanned, but it could as well have been any external trigger, such as a button pressed or a motion detector being triggered. This is part of what we call Event Driven Digital Signage.

During the event, we met with a number of large companies that expressed interest in deploying Screenly around this concept so we are super excited about getting validation from the market.

If you’re curious about the demo, you can take a look at our video demo below. However, we’d like to apologize for the poor audio quality in the video as this was recorded on the show floor at MWC.

Raspberry Pi Birthday Weekend

This past weekend, the Raspberry Pi foundation celebrated Raspberry Pi’s 5th birthday. We were, of course, there to partake in the celebrations together with our friends from Pi Supply. In addition to seeing a lot of exciting projects, we also got to show our demo from MWC to Eben Upton (the creator of the Raspberry Pi), who was very impressed by how far we are able to push the Raspberry Pi.

CEO and Co-founder of Screenly. Viktor loves taking ideas and turning them into products and services. You can frequently find him on the speaking circuit around the globe. He spent a big part of his adult life as a digital nomad. Viktor is also passionate about DevOps and IoT security. You can find Viktor on Twitter under @vpetersson.